June 2006 Archives

In this summer’s Finnair Plus News, Markku Remes, the manager for Finnair’s long haul product, promises that the airline’s new Airbus long haul fleet will have wireless internet and laptop power ports in all classes.

Finnair is, as far as I know, the first airline to make such an announcement. Many, including SAS and Lufthansa, already offer WiFi throughout the plane (using Boeing’s struggling Connexion service), but power plugs have only been available in the premium classes. They make all the difference on long haul flights, where you can get internet access for the whole eight-hour flight for $30 but run out of batteries in two.

In a related area, Finnair has decided to follow rather than to lead: they, like many other airlines, have started to nickle-and-dime their business class and frequent flyer customers with paid-for wireless access in their lounges. The cost is four euro per hour or €20 per month.

Anyone traveling a lot or traveling in premium classes can attest to how absurd this practice feels: paying, say, $5000 for a ticket does get you into a first class lounge, surrounded by $150 bottles of free booze, but want to check the news on your laptop? Sir, that’d be $10 extra!

The credit card industry’s migration from the magnetic stripe to new chip-and-pin cards is an extreme example of the network effect: the benefit — increased security — will only be realized when everyone has moved over and support for magnetic stripes can be discontinued.

But the industry keeps anchoring its customers to the past. Visa and MasterCard introduced the mini card a few years back, and American Express is now responding with the Butterfly. These products have two things in common: they both make carrying credit cards more convenient, and they both are fundamentally, physically incompatible with the chip-based card infrastructure.

This will both slow down the migration of chip-based cards and anger customers when their convenient accessory cards are finally taken from them — a lose-lose proposition if there ever was one.

Visa, at least, seems to have realized their blunder and started pushing an RFID-based mini card as a way to keep the form-factor benefits while moving to chip-based technology. But with no infrastructure support and a growing privacy concerns over RFID, that approach looks like a pipe dream to me.

Sofa Control and Remote Buddy, two great $10 apps released simultaneously to do the same thing: extend the usage of the Apple Remote. We customers rejoice — but probably not what the developers hoped for.

Just received a marketing email from “Hilton HHonors® Do not reply to this e-mail”. That’s the From field — the first thing Mail shows me about this email. I read it like this: It’s okay for us to spam you, consumer, but don’t you dare write us back. We are not interested in what you have to say, consumer.

I admit it: I went out and bought World of Warcraft within days after seeing Joi Ito’s engaging presentation on it at Aula 2006. Today I gave my girlfriend Leena the included guest pass, allowing her to try out WoW for 10 days for free.

After the grueling five-CD installation (made worse by the DVD drive in her MacBook Pro being defective, just like mine is) and a 450MB online update, she was ready — to queue for admittance to Aerie Peak, the often-full realm I play in.

And then came the unbelievable part. Blizzard, the makers of WoW, have put the Guest Pass trial users on a shitlist: everyone else has priority over them, so the first time user will just end up staring at her queue position going from 2 to 9, from 9 to 30, and from 30 to worse. Needless to say, she, like most reasonable people, gave up after a few minutes of this.

This is probably the biggest tech marketing faux pas I’ve encountered in years. WoW’s figure of six million subscribers is all the more impressive seeing how they are avoiding to attract any new ones.

According to a blurb on MacMinute, a chap by the name of Joshua Coventry has founded a new Mac software publishing company called Fastforward. They have no products yet, but instead present a unique new approach to software publishing:

We are taking a new approach at software; an approach which is more ethical using fair pricing, existing users are not charged for upgrades and products are priced suitably towards a price everyone can afford.

Now, we get our fair share of grumbling about Knox’s $29.95 price point. Usually the gist of the complaint is that a lower price point would be more appropriate, although I personally can’t imagine what kind of a cost-benefit analysis would indicate $20 to be a reasonable price for an application and simultaneously indicate $30 to be too much.

Anyway, I guess we’ve been lucky in that nobody has claimed that our pricing is unfair or unethical before.

When Apple introduced the current iMac form factor in 2004 by asking Where did the computer go, I thought it was one of the worst slogans to come out of Apple in a long time. I mean, come on, the iMac is so thick and has such a counter-intuitively huge bezel below the screen that nobody could ever mistake it for a display.

Boy, how wrong I was. Since that time, I’ve heard a ton of people making that mistake. One person even hesitated to upgrade from an old strawberry-red iMac to the new model because she preferred an all-in-one system.

The latest example is a story on the Apple cult in the May-June issue of Bisnes.fi, a Finnish business monthly. When describing the SoHo Apple Store, Leena Maria Aula writes about “white displays” being everywhere. I’m not sure which is the bigger accomplishment here: managing to write a four-page Apple story without learning what an iMac is, or coming to the conclusion that the cult of Apple is about fighting capitalism. (Yes, really.) Either way, I guess the story illustrates that Apple is not nearly as mainstream as we, neck deep in the business, like to think.

At yesterday’s Aula 2006 event here in Helsinki, Clay Shirky opined that a major advantage of the open source ecosystem is the way in which cost of failure is borne by the individual failing, rather than by the community as a whole. In other words, creating a failing piece of software doesn’t hurt the open source community the way it hurts a company, and this gives an edge to open source.

I’m not sure if Shirky is really comparing apples to apples here — it seems to me that the “capitalist ecosystem”, like indeed any ecosystem, has this exact same advantage. Anyway, the practical side of his point, as described by Bruno Giussani, is that

Organizations that want to encourage innovation should focus on reducing the cost of failure rather than focusing on minimizing its likelihood, as most companies do today.

One way companies are heeding this advice is by embracing the Perpetual Beta — even commercial applications are now often released as, basically, proof of concepts, and only the apps that are proven to be popular will then receive the polish typical of the yesteryear’s “1.0.”

We at MK&C first embraced this approach with Pyro, which we released as Beta 1 after only about two weeks of work. Since then, though, Pyro has proven to be popular enough to be a reasonable investment and accordingly we’ve spent the time needed to polish it. So, without further ado, introducing Pyro 1.0!

Pyro 1.0fc1 is out. Changes include drag and drop file upload, Cmd-F find support, stability improvements and other more minor changes. Entering final candidate means that we are now feature complete for 1.0. I guess, back in the day, the versions before this one would’ve been called alphas or even pre-alphas, with this being the first beta. Even greek numbers suffer from inflation…

Being feature complete also means that we will not be shipping the most requested-for feature, multiple Campfire account support, in Pyro 1.0. Sorry. The Pyro architecture is currently very much geared towards supporting a single Campfire window at a time, and changing that would require some serious refactoring.

Once we’ve survived what’s shaping up to be a very busy summer and autumn season with a ton of commercial work, WWDC, and various other time sinks, I’ll take another look at the business case for new Pyro features. Meanwhile, thanks for understanding, and I hope you’ll enjoy 1.0fc1!

The Omni Group’s site for OmniDazzle opens with:

Lost your cursor? Hey, it happens — especially when you’re navigating across the four-million-pixels-and-counting landscape of a 30” Cinema Display.

Would it, then, be wholly unreasonable to assume that OmniDazzle was a cursor locator utility? Apparently, the Omni Mouth says yes:

The moral of the story here is that customers tend to take your own one-line characterization of your app quite literally. That happened with Knox as well. For a long time, our site mostly emphasized how you could create encrypted vaults with Knox, and we got a tremendous backlash with people pointing out — rightly so — that the same thing can be accomplished with Disk Utility. In the current incarnation of the site, we try to focus on Knox’s other management features, backup support, Spotlight control, and so on, while being up front about using the same encrypted disk images as Disk Utility.

Seems to have worked well so far.

Google Spreadsheets. Just tried it and wow — the SubEthaEsque collaborative editing is a perfect fit for a spreadsheet. You can’t get this functionality from Microsoft, no matter how much you’d be willing to pay. Also, for the Apple-only extremists out there, iWorks’s lack of a spreadsheet suddenly feels so very inconsequential.